Equipment - End of Season Maintenance

Not to be confused with "Beginning of Season Maintenance", naturally.

The end of each season sees the normal wear and tear on the bike, the stuff that you think, "Well, it should be okay next week". My thought process usually goes a bit more like, "Well, I'll replace that part next week".

In Maine I don't think I mentioned it in the post but right before I left for the last Kingman Loop I switched out the cleats. It's one thing to break a cleat at home, no more than about 20 minutes away from home base, with so little elevation changes that it takes me 40 hours of riding to climb the same amount as 8 hours of "flat" riding in Maine.

It's another thing to break a cleat in a place where I may not have a cell signal, there aren't any bike shops around, and where I may be a couple hours ride away from home base. Even if I had a signal it may be that the calvary, i.e. any potential help, may not have a signal.

Finally there's the off chance that I run into some wolf or something, even get bitten by a couple of dogs.

With these factors in mind I felt it prudent to swap out the cleats. I didn't know when I'd last replaced the cleats but I thought it was in the spring. However, checking back on Strava, it seems that I replaced the cleats last June. Based on my Strava log I have about 200 hours on the cleats. This includes a bit more walking around than normal at some points, especially at Bethel, and a bit less than normal, like my trainer rides. Whatever, 200 hours is pretty good. I'm at 140+ hours for 2013 and I did 75 hours in 2012 on them after June 2012.

I also took the opportunity to twist the left cleat a touch. Usually I like my heel to miss the crank by about 10 mm. For whatever reason I had my heel a bit closer and I found myself twisting my foot outward all the time. This didn't do much for my clipped in confidence as I unclipped somewhat regularly. With short rides and races I kept forgetting about it, but in Maine, with lots of time, I thought about it a lot.

Therefore when I replaced the cleats I adjusted the left one. Of course I then had a really fast ride (for me) immediately after. No knee pain either, and I have really, really fragile knees.

I kick myself when I realize stuff like this.

I mean, I knew it before, but it didn't seem important enough to deal with it. When I finally deal with it I'd think, "Why didn't I do that earlier?"

Along those lines I switched out my cranks. My SRM battery died in July or something and I've been too lazy to fix it. First I needed to find my Cannondale SI crank tools, which I lent the shop when they faced the BB shell. Ends up I buried it in my gear bag so I'd never forget it. Next I needed to stage a new battery (I have it and I know where it is) and solder it in. Finally I wanted to make a decision on crank length.

This year I committed to the 170 cranks. In 2010, my best recent year, I was on 175s, and I was on them since 2004 (minus a break in 2008) after I dropped a friend and returning to racing road rider while on my 175mm crank mountain bike. I then went to do sprints with a 175 mm road crank and went 10 mph faster than my previous 170mm sprint. I wasn't in shape but I figured that some of that 10 mph had to have come from the longer cranks.

I wanted to try 170s again because in my heyday, back in the 80s and 90s, I rode 167.5s and I was literally 6-8 mph faster in my fastest sprints. I thought I could regain that speed by getting shorter cranks.

Unfortunately aging 20 years had something to do with my loss of speed, and 170s actually made me slower than the 175s. In similar circumstances (tailwind sprint on the same course) I was about 3 mph slower on the 170s. Also I haven't even gotten a whiff of those heyday type speeds while on the 170s.

Therefore I gave up on the 170s.

Instead of doing a new battery and stuff I just put the other SRM Cannondale SI cranks on, the ones from the black bike. The battery is good, I have a second head unit so no calibrating, and it has both the 175s and my best-so-far Keos, the Carbons.

BB axle looks fine

The two right side crank arms.

That's another thing. The Keo Max2 pedals feel really loose, like really loose. The Carbons, allegedly possessing the same retaining force, are much more decisive in their grasp of the cleat. I made the assumption that the Keo Max2s would have the same retaining power due to the same newton-meter rating, but alas the pedals easily give up the cleat.

So my overall changes are as follows:
1. New cleats on my shoes (and they didn't change the retention feel on the Keo Max2s).
2. 175mm crank arms, instead of 170mm. This involves dropping the saddle 5mm to keep the saddle-pedal distance consistent.
3. Second SRM spider with newer/working battery.

I approached my first ride on the 175s with some caution. Longer cranks means a bit more stress on the knees, not because of the higher leverage but because your leg closes more with a longer crank. It opens the same amount, based on the same saddle height, but your knee closes up more. This means more pressure on the knee cap at the top of the pedal stroke.

Well I got on the bike, did some spinning while deliberately not looking at the SRM headunit, and then peeked when things felt okay.

110 rpm.

Whoa.

I expected 90 rpm or lower, after coming from the 170s. Apparently I'm more used to the 175s, even after a season on the 170s.

For 15 minutes I averaged over 100 rpm on the 175s.

No knee twinges, no weird aches, nothing.

I geared up and slowed down my pedaling speed.

One concern with the 175s was that my legs would come up a bit more, a total of 1 cm, based on the fact that my saddle dropped 5mm but the cranks come up 5mm more as well. In my 2012 fitness levels, or even my early 2013 fitness level, I was basically too fat to ride the 175s without gut punching myself with my quads on each pedal stroke.

Now, at the end of 2013, having dropped 12-13 pounds since March, I can pedal the 175s fine.

If I can continue the trend and get down another 10 pounds or so, I'll be back at or close to my 2010 weight. That was a good year, and I hope to at least start 2014 in a similar fashion.

How To - Campy Chain Tool

One of the cool things about Campy is that they have some of the nicest tools around. The "Campy Tool Kit" is an incredible (but sort of outdated) tool kit, useful for everything from facing a bottom bracket shell to chasing fork threads to aligning the rear derailleur hanger to installing a fixed cup.

If you don't know what some of those parts are, you're not alone. I haven't seen a new "cup and bearings" bottom bracket for probably 10 years. Head tubes rarely need facing nowadays, ditto bottom bracket shells. You can't tweak an aluminum derailleur hanger, nor a titanium one. And heaven forbid you try and "align" some carbon fiber dropouts on your fork!

What made the Campy tool kit so nice was the incredible precision used to craft the tools. The various pieces moved in slow motion, the tolerances so tight that the film of grease acted as a brake. Try and slide a spacer off the headset pressing tool and it would slowly, on its own time, work its way down, like it was a hydraulic device sliding along the shaft.

I, unfortunately, don't own such a kit. I worked at a shop that had two (!) of them. But I personally never had one.

When I updated my 9s Ergo bike to 10s, I learned that my Shimano HG chaintool, so nice for a 9s setup, didn't work well for the narrower 10s chain. After a harrowing experience installing my first 10s chain with the wrong tool, I decided I'd get the right one.

Problem was that it was something like $100.

A couple things convinced me to make the investment.

First off, sweating bullets while installing a chain is not my idea of fun.

Second, breaking said improperly-installed chain would lead to disastrous results. I'm risk averse, believe it or not, and having a sketchy chain on my bike is way beyond risky to me.

Finally, if I bought a Campy chain tool, well, it's a Campy chain tool. I figured it's got to be something spectacular.

And so it was.

It came in a cardboard box. For $100 I wasn't expecting wood, unlike the much more expensive Campy Tool Kit or its smaller brother, the Campy Freewheel Tool Kit. But that's okay, because the tool made up for it. This sucker was heavy!

Note mass - about 2/3 of a pound. You could kill someone with this tool.

So what makes this tool so, well, Campy?

Luckily, I took a bunch of pictures.

One of the things that is a real pain when installing chains is having the chain creep up and out of the tool while you're trying to press a pin through it. This happens anytime the pin is hitting the link at a non-perpendicular angle.

Since it's very difficult to control the user (a.k.a. "the nut holding the tool"), Campy, in their infinite wisdom, chose to control the chain.

The little pull tab thing is what holds the chain in place.

Campy designed the tool to use a double pronged, spring metal "chain holder", something that to me reminds me of a grenade pin.

(Having never touched a real grenade, I couldn't tell you what such a pin looks like, but if I were to make one up, I'd make it like this one.)

This slides into a perfectly machined pair of holes, over the chain (sitting in its little well), and into two more perfectly machined holes. With four points of contact with the tool, the chain holder can't flex. The chain is perfectly aligned with the pin driver. It's virtually impossible to screw up the install at this point.

The chain tool with the "pin" in place, sitting on the illustrated manual describing how to use the whole tool.

I took a picture of the manual. You can see how the pin slides in, trapping the chain.

Since I'd already installed my chain, I had to wait until I needed to install another chain. This ended up taking about a year, when I bought a back up frame. Apparently I didn't ride enough (and still haven't ridden enough) to warrant replacing the original 10 speed chain.

The back up bike here, the chain in its box, I quickly retrieved the Campy chain tool from its lair deep within my Bike Tool Box. I gingerly pulled the Tool out, lay it down next to the chain.

Chain.

Check.

Pin thing (the "master pin" for the chain).

Check.

Campy Chain Tool.

Check.

I measured out how much chain I'd need to "cut", using my preferred small-small method. This is where I put it in the small-small (39x11) and figure out where the chain starts to exert tension on the rear derailleur (with the b-screw completely unscrewed).

I cut the chain using the Tool.

Beautiful.

Then, with the very precious (I only had one) master pin, I started assembling the two ends of the chain on the Tool. The hand grenade pin thing held the two ends of chain in place, and when I drove the self-guiding master pin in, everything moved smoothly.

It took only slight pressure on the T-handle to screw in the master pin, which in turn slid into the chain about as smoothly as the grenade pin thing slides into the Tool.

When the master pin is in enough to look like its neighbors, I removed the grenade pin and took the chain out.

No stiffness. No unwanted flex. No link damage. No pin damage.

Perfect.

Just like it's supposed to be.

How To - Clean Your Bike

Today is the first day of a three or four day heat wave in Connecticut. Relatively speaking of course. Normal temperatures typically hit the mid 30s to the low 40s during the day, and much of the day is spent at or below freezing.

However, today we hit 52 (allegedly). Tomorrow is forecast to hit 60, and then we're supposed to have a 55 degree day and a 48 degree day.

Sounds like Florida to me!

Actually, Gainesville was colder in the morning the second last time we went there - high 20s to low 30s.

Anyway, I started off my mini big session with a ride into Massachusetts. It's a loop I've done before but I suffered like a dog the last time I did it. Today was a bit better. I wasn't out to break records and in fact I never did a sprint. But I managed to make it over the hill on Route 57 in reasonable shape and I never really faltered throughout the ride, a good sign.

Massachusetts has one consistent road feature I don't enjoy - a non existent shoulder on main roads. In some places the white line actually falls away because the pavement under it is gone. And instead of putting dirt or something obviously "not road" next to the road, Massachusetts put gravel. So it's driveable for a car but dangerous for a cyclist. A bit of my riding is done on such roads and it's definitely disconcerting. I end up riding through a lot of sand, through puddles, and get the bike pretty messy, all because I have no road to work with. I feel much more relaxed when I get back into Connecticut.

A disconcerting thing happened on one climb - in my lower gears (39x25 and 23), my chain made grinding noises. Dirt had gotten onto the cogs and were doing their best to prematurely wear out my drivetrain. So I tried to avoid those gears. I thought about rinsing them off with water but I didn't have any stop points and I didn't want to risk running out of water.

Chain grinding aside, I added on a loop of about 16 or 17 miles, my standard "Quarry Road Loop" as I've come to call it. On a fast day it takes me about 52 minutes to complete, an average day is about 55 minutes (all this at a not very intense pace). On my mountain bike it takes 57-60 minutes just for comparison sake. Today, after 2.5 hours of riding through the surprisingly cold hills of Massachusetts, the loop took about 54 minutes. Not a fast loop, but not a slow one. I felt reasonable, no cramps, no agonizingly aching back, and my legs were totally fine except they'd fatigue pretty quickly on short hills.

After I got back from the ride I cleaned my bike. Since there are at some points about two feet of snow on the sides of the road (Massachusetts, when I look past the non existent shoulder) and the temps were way above melting, most of the roads were damp with snow run off. My bike was appropriately plastered with mud, sand, dirt, and bits and pieces of yet-to-be-decomposed leaves and twigs.

Since I was already sort of a mess, I got two buckets of water (one with soapy water), my cleaning kit, and went at it. I read about Moreno Argentin when he came to the US for the World Championships in Colorado. He rode with some journalist types and the thing that got them was that no matter what the weather, he always showed up with a clean bike.

Mind you it rained every day out there, and many of the rides set off with wet stuff falling from the sky. When you ride in rain the chain gets gunky, the brake pads bleed blackness everywhere, and the bike becomes a general mess.

Yet each day Argentin showed up with a bike that could have come off a showroom floor.

The kicker was that he was doing the work, not a team mechanic. It was him cleaning the brake stuff off, him cleaning the chain, him wiping everything down.

When I told this story to the guys at the store, we pledged to treat our bikes the same way. We'd go for a ride, return, and detail our bikes, sometimes for hours. Back then it seemed that bikes were it, but without a nice big shop in which to detail your bike and without a couple friends doing the same thing, it's not as much fun detailing the bike. I have a more efficient way of doing this now.

Detailing Your Bike in 30 Minutes or Less.

A couple caveats. First, the bike has to have been kept somewhat clean prior to this "detail". In other words, you don't let more than a week or two of riding go by without performing this detail work (don't count riding indoors as riding time). Second, if you ever ride in the wet, the bike gets detailed. Third, you have all the gear you need.

Ingredients:
- Bike, a bit dirty but not filthy.
- Two 5 gallon buckets, one filled 2/3 with soapy water (use car wash, not dish detergent), one filled 2/3 with rinsing water (both warm if it's winter, cold if it's summer).
- Gear brush (I have a Park and a Pedros and I use whichever I find first)
- Car wash sponge thing, leave in the soapy water
- Water bottle you don't use for drinking or peeing, leave in the rinse water.
- Simple Green degreaser or some other biodegradeable stuff.

First find a place where you can wash your bike. Usually the street is good, somewhere so the waste water can go somewhere other than the grass or into a big puddle. Don't get too close to a sewer grate since bits and pieces get sucked in there like it's a black hole.

Next, lug your stuff there.

Steps:
1. Spray Simple Green (on "Spray", not "Stream") on the chain, chainrings, and cassette. Let it soak a bit.
2. Get a bottle of rinse/plain water and squirt it at the sand/mud on the stays, brakes, fork. The idea is to get the heavy stuff off, not make it clean.
3. Grab the car sponge thing, make sure it's nice and heavy with soapy water, and run it over your bike, top down. So run it over your top tube (maybe your saddle), down tube, stem and sides of head tube, seat tube, seat stays, forks. Rinse the sponge thing and, with a new load of soapy water, run the sponge around the outside of the wheels/tires (rims, tires, outer ends of spokes). Don't let it touch the chain area for now, we're just trying to get the bike clean enough that mud and dirt don't fall into the chain while your cleaning the chain. At the same time we don't want your sponge thing to get greasy.
4. Put the bike in the big ring, small cog. Re-spray the chain, chainring, and cassette with Simple Green.
5. Use the gear brush and brush across the chain on the chainring. Brush towards the bottom bracket, do a pair of links at a time. The chainring holds the chain in place so you can use a lot of force to brush away grit, grease, etc. Spray Simple Green every now and then and you'll see when it starts getting clean under the black mess you're making. Move to the next pair.
6. When you get to a clean pair, you've done a lap. Only two more laps to go. The next lap you're going to do the middle of the chain. Don't focus on the rollers. Instead focus on the inside of the plates, especially the outer plates. Black gunk builds up there and if you don't get it out, the first pedal stroke or two will make your pristine cassette filthy. A couple more pedal strokes and your chainrings will resemble your cassette. So go through, jam the brushes in the middle, get the stuff out of there.
7. When you get to a clean middle bit of the chain, you've done your lap. Time for a break. Use the water bottle and squirt rinse water on the chain. Looks nice, right? It does but it's not clean yet.
8. We're going to leave the third lap for later. Now the teeth. First the chainrings. Since the chain is on the big ring, do the little one first. Clean the valleys of the teeth, where the rollers hit, because that's dirty. Also do the sides and the little ridge where the teeth become the ring. Don't forget to hit the bit between the big and little ring, and don't forget behind the crankarm.
9. Do the big ring next, hit it where the teeth point to the rear hub since the chain doesn't ride there. Get the valleys of the teeth and the ridge on the outside. Remember to spray more Simple Green every now and then.
10. Now do the cassette. I just hold the bike up with one hand and brush with the other. I brush parallel to the chain, on the top of the cassette. The brush going backwards rotates the cassette, the brush going forwards cleans. Scrub away. When I get tired of that, I also scrub down across all the teeth - this gets the valleys of the cassette cogs clean. While you're doing the cassette hit the derailleur pulleys. The upper one is a pain.
11. Rinse again. Now it'll look really nice. And it's still filthy. Turn the bike around so you're looking at the left (non-drive) side. The chain and rings are filthy. Gross. Do a third lap of the chain, scrubbing it while it sits on the big ring. Clean the insides of the chainrings too. Spray more Simple Green.
12. Now rinse again. Now you're talking. Stand up, stretch your back.
13. Take the front and rear wheels out, lean them against your buckets. Put the bike down very gently, fork tips and brake levers on the ground, lean against something secure.
14. Take the front wheel and go around it with the soapy sponge thing. Wipe down the spokes (easier than polishing them individually), wipe down the rim sides and tires. Jam the sponge inside the spokes and wash the hub center. Rotate and repeat - should take 3 or 4 scrubs to do the hub. The rim should be very clean looking. Rinse with the waterbottle.
15. Take the rear wheel. Spray some Simple Green on the cassette, clean whatever you missed. Use the sponge thing and wash the tire, rim, spokes, hub. Rinse.
16. Get bike, spray derailleur pulleys with Simple Green. They are the dirtiest part of the drivetrain, guaranteed. Scrub with brush, rinse, repeat until they look clean. You may learn something about the pulleys like, "Hey, look! The pulleys have writing on them!" Also get the pulley cages, they are the second dirtiest part of your drivetrain.
17. Reassemble your bike. Pick it up and take it to a clean place with no sand on the floor. Get some WD40 or your favorite lube and put some on the chain (on the bottom chain between the derailleur and the crank, and only put lube on the top, i.e. the contact area). Wipe off the chain by turning crank backwards while holding dirty rag to chain.

Note: "WD" of WD-40 means "Water Displacing" or something along those lines. So if you just washed your bike, WD-40 is a natural choice to "displace" the water that's on your chain. Whatever you do, don't leave it wet. Your chain will start rusting in a couple of hours.

18. Wipe off the rest of your bike, leave it to dry.

This should take you, after the first few times, perhaps 30 minutes or less. On cold wet days I do a rough job and get it done in 10 minutes. On a hot summer day with no bugs outside and cold water in the buckets, I'll dwaddle for an hour making sure the bike is spotless.

There are variations of course. Instead of a rinse bucket you could have a hose. At my former house I ran a hose from our basement sink - hot water makes for cleaning your bike in the cold not as unpleasant as it might be. If your bike is more dusty than anything else, the full blown wash probably isn't necessary, and if it was clean before the ride, it'll take very little time to do since your drivetrain cleaning will be sort of done already.

Anyway, I did this at the end of my ride today so my bike is ready to go tomorrow. My "I only have one" things like booties are washed and about to be dried.

Tomorrow I'll be on a fresh bike, with fresh gear, even if it's only a few hundred yards before I go through a puddle.